“This election is not about Donald Trump. The name on the Republican presidential ballot could have been any of the 16 that ran in the primary races.”, this is the first sentence in article.
I understand that the author is trying to make some type of positive point, but the first statement in the article is false. The name absolutely could not have been Jeb Bush, or John Kasich, Lindsay Graham, and to a lesser extent most of the others. The only one who brought it all together was Trump. The only one who clicked with the people in the primary by telling the absolute unvarnished and ugly truth was Trump.
Sorry those were the first TWO sentences in the article.